On the Conversational Basis of Some Presuppositions
This paper, originally published in 2001, deals with the question of the source of presuppositions, focusing on the question of whether presuppositions are conventional properties of linguistic expressions, or arise as inferences derivable from ordinary c
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Abstract This paper, originally published in 2001, deals with the question of the source of presuppositions, focusing on the question of whether presuppositions are conventional properties of linguistic expressions, or arise as inferences derivable from ordinary content in combination with some general conversational principles. I argue that at least some presuppositions should be analysed as conversational inferences, on the grounds that they show two of the hallmarks of such inferences: contextual defeasibility and nondetachability. I make this case for the presuppositions associated with change of state predicates and with factives. I argue further for the need for a general principle for deriving presuppositions as inferences by illustrating a variety of cases of presupposition-like inferences not clearly involving a lexical presupposition trigger. In the second half of the paper, I move towards the development of a general conversational account of the relevant presuppositions. Building on a brief comment in Stalnaker (1974), I develop the following pair of ideas: first, that an utterance embedding a proposition P may be seen as raising the question whether P; and second, that P may be related to a further proposition Q in such a way that it would make sense to raise the question whether P only if one already believed Q to be true. It is these required prior beliefs that constitute conversationally derived presuppositions. Although the account developed here is only a preliminary attempt, the relevance of contextually salient questions, or sets of alternatives, to an account of presupposition has been taken up in subsequent work, notably Abusch (2010) and Simons et al. (2010).
This paper was originally presented at Semantics and Linguistic Theory 11, held at NYU in 2001, and was published in the conference proceedings (R. Hastings, B. Jackson and Z. Zvolensky, eds., Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 11, Ithaca, NY: CLC Publications: 431–448.) It is reprinted here with only very minor additions and modifications. Most of these appear in footnotes below. Footnotes which have been added for this reprinting are prefaced with the notation (2011). M. Simons (&) Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA e-mail: [email protected]
A. Capone et al. (eds.), Perspectives on Linguistic Pragmatics, Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology 2, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-01014-4_13, Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013
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1 Introduction The current literature on presupposition focuses almost exclusively on the projection problem: the question of how and why the presuppositions of atomic clauses are projected to complex sentences which embed them. Very little attention has been paid to the question of how and why these presuppositions arise at all. As Kay (1992: 335) observes, ‘‘treatments of the presupposition inheritance problem almost never deal with the reasons that individual words and constructions give rise, in the first place, to the particular presuppositi
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